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Monday, March 04, 2002 ( 3/04/2002 08:00:00 AM ) Bill S. TRUTH STILL OUT THERE; AUDIENCE NOT - Well, the final eleven eps of The X-Files started last night, and Fox is promising that this last arc will answer all of our questions. I don’t believe ‘em (Trust No One!), but I’m watching anyway. I’ve invested too much time in this series to stop now, and I still haven’t developed the same degree of brand loyalty to ABC’s Files-indebted conspiracy series, Alias. I won’t argue that the show has lost something (besides a sizable share of its audience) ever since David Duchovny first started showing his boredom with it: his quirky personality was just the right leavening agent for a series that often ended on a downbeat or inconclusive note. Robert Patrick demonstrated that he can act on The Sopranos, but writer/creator Chris Carter and company have bent so far back to make his John Dogget the anti-Mulder that the nicest spin you can put on his character is to call him stolid. That leaves Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully (for my money a sexier actress than flavor-of-the-month Jennifer Garner), but to date she’s been given precious little to do this season. Still, the show is still capable of delivering the goods, especially in its stand-alone horror stories. Though they’ve had their moments, I’ve generally been less interested in the ongoing conspiracy eps: they’ve never felt as fully thought-out as, say, Joss Whedon’s season-by-season continuity on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. This final arc begins with a two-part mythos tale, of course - something to do with Scully’s mysteriously empowered baby (preternatural infants in peril: between this and Angel, you’ve gotta wonder if a new generation of TV scribes has recently entered the fatherhood track) - and the first night’s offering had all the requisite levels of dread and oddness. I had a good time watching it, but I’m more eagerly anticipating the upcoming Lone Gunman one-shot. With any luck, it’ll mute the pain of their lame-ass spin-off. I’m gonna miss the show - and I really don’t hold much hope for an ongoing movie franchise. But few TV series have lasted as long without seriously diluting themselves, and when you consider that X-Files has held up in a genre that’s even more difficult to convincingly sustain, the accomplishment is even more noteworthy. # | |
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